B Whole Tone on the Flamenco Guitar

Where B Whole Tone lies on the fretboard of a guitar tuned EADGBE, and how a flamenco passage lands it on the count.

B Whole Tone runs 6 notes to the octave, laid across an EADGBE fretboard with every B marked — the pitch a phrase keeps coming home to.

Weightless and dreamlike — six equal whole steps with no leading tone, so nothing pulls anywhere. Blurry, floating, and faintly unsettling, like a dream sequence.

Heard in: Impressionist piano (Debussy's "Voiles"), Thelonious Monk's runs, dream-sequence film cues, and the augmented and 7#5 chords it fits in jazz.

On the flamenco guitar a scale is the raw material of the falseta — a composed melodic passage the guitarist drops between sung verses — and of the runs a toque answers the cante with.

Whatever notes a passage runs through, it is measured in compás: it sets off and comes to rest where the count of the palo allows, so every scale here is finally heard against a cycle of accents.